One of the most powerful, but also most perilous, national-security posts in the post-9/11 U.S. government is the job of homeland security secretary. The secretary is responsible for running a huge department encompassing a grab bag of agencies. These include a medium-sized Navy (the U.S. Coast Guard), an elite plainclothes presidential bodyguard regiment (the U.S. Secret Service), a substantial prison system (detention facilities run by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau) and massive uniformed battalions that police airports and land borders. Not to mention the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a bureau that processes citizenship applications and the department's own intelligence office. The person heading the department has sweeping powers to organize, hire and fire workforces and award giant contracts for high-tech equipment like radiation detectors and border-protection sensors. But if another terrorist attack occurs inside U.S. borders, the homeland security secretary will be among the first to face blame. The outgoing secretary, Michael Chertoff, is still living down his department's slow response to a non-man-made disaster, Hurricane Katrina.

Given the challenges, perhaps it's not surprising that President-elect Obama's team is proceeding carefully when it comes to Homeland Security. Obama's transition team for Homeland Security will only meet for the first time later this week, according to a Democrat close to the Obama campaign who would speak about the decision-making only on condition of anonymity. The person reportedly heading the team is Rand Beers, a low-key former White House and State Department adviser on intelligence and counterterrorism issues who resigned from George W. Bush's National Security Council staff only days before the start of the Iraq War and subsequently became a top national-security adviser to Sen. John Kerry's unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign (Beers could not be reached for comment). Despite the Obama team's cautious approach to the subject, the president-elect does have several high-profile candidates who might be interested in the the top Homeland Security post. Only a few days before the election, one of the nation's most respected cops, Los Angeles Police Department chief William Bratton, almost applied publicly for a top job in an Obama administration when he coauthored an op-ed piece in the New York Daily News that suggested Osama bin Laden "likely" wanted John McCain to become president. Another esteemed police exec to whom the Obama camp could reach out is New York police commissioner Ray Kelly, who under President Clinton ran U.S. Customs, most of whose operations are now part of Homeland Security. Rep Jane Harman, who chairs a House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, is also reputed to be interested in the post; Michael Sheehan, a former top federal and NYPD terrorism expert, is also being mentioned as a possible top Homeland Security appointee.

To help clean up the Homeland Security's reputation for exacerbating, rather than alleviating natural disasters like Katrina, some Democrats say that Obama's team may reach out to James Lee Witt, a former Arkansas emergency-management and FEMA chief under administrations led by Bill Clinton. Most experts believe that Homeland Security remains a nightmarish bureaucratic tangle, however, which even the most skilled and experienced managers will have trouble sorting out.